I really liked todays podcast about making assumptions and finding the nuance and difference between what we know and what we assume- what we think as normal and what we think as bad. Bezio focused on drug usage and the myths surrounding the war on drugs, marijuana, and oppressing minority communities. The counterculture of the 1960s and the usage of LSD and marijuana motivated these “Just say No” campaigns. This time period is extremely interesting to me and I am even doing my research project on it. Everything Bezio was saying is actually relevant to my project, because it addresses the underlying problems in our society that cause multiple things to happen in different aspects of life. Bezio talked about drugs, dress codes, and religion, and my project is about serial killers.
This seems like a pretty wide range of things that are pretty different, but they are actually pretty similar. I was researching American society’s obsession with Ted Bundy and how he is in Netflix documentaries and movies that everyone is fascinated by. As i was researching I came across a really interesting article that said Ted Bundy is not famous for the heinous crimes he did, but that he is famous for being white. The author of the article said that everyone was so shocked about him being a psychopath because he seemed so “normal”, the picture perfect American. As you dig deeper into why Ted Bundy seemed so normal, it is basically because he was white and society does not typically associate whiteness with crime. This was an extremely interesting connection and assumption that I did not know would connect dress codes to serial killers.
Indeed, this is an insightful observation. I never knew that people were so fascinated with Ted Bundy because of his identity as a white American male over the fact that he committed heinous crimes. I wonder, though, if people’s fascination with white American men who commit crimes changes who people picture when thinking of crime or whether it remains the same- picturing only Black and Latinx men as those who commit crimes.
You bring up a very interesting point about Ted Bundy’s character as a white men. I, too, have watched documentaries where people are shocked he committed these crimes, mainly because he was so charming and “attractive.” He does not fit the image of a criminal which has been engrained into people through movies and the news media, illustrating the blind assumptions people have when imagining the “usual” identity of a criminal. This especially ties into the war on drugs, in which black communities were disproportionately incarcerated, due to racial profiling and mass policing of black neighborhoods.